The challenge for critics who would place Emerson in a genealogy of American pragmatism, then, is to avoid the pitfall of reducing Emerson to less than the still-relevant, still-indispensable thinker that he is, the rare kind of writer who requires us to return to him again and again, and always rewards us when we are willing to assume the complexity of his thought and follow it where it leads.

This collection of nine essays, several stemming from a 2004 AAR session, concentrates on the relationship between American pragmatism, primarily the philosophy of William James, and Catholic Modernism.

What seems to be occurring at present is that, after many years of traveling separate paths, authors trained in analytic philosophy and those trained in more historically oriented traditions are beginning to enter into conversation with each other regarding the early history of American pragmatism.

First, Johnson is seen as holding particular philosophical positions within established systems of thought and belief--European phenomenology, American pragmatism, Buddhist meditation, existential Christianity.

Penzel correctly writes: "His adaptive personality and scholarly eclecticism, his Hegelian idealism and American pragmatism, no doubt helped to ease his way into the mainstream of American life" (149).

Lopez is right that Emerson anticipates much of the anti-foundational thinking of western modernity and thus deserves to be considered a crucial figure in that history; he is also right to interpret Emerson as central to the American pragmatism that would often disavow the "transcendental-genteel" Emerson.

It emerged early in the century as a complex intermingling of the German social theory of Dilthey and, to a lesser extent, Weber, and the American pragmatism set forth by Mead (1909, 1934), James (1907), and Dewey (1938).

As Jeff Kelley suggests, an important precondition of Kaprow's reorientation of practice from frame-bound object to experiential sensation is found in his reading of John Dewey's Art and Experience, and in his at least residual attachment to a form of American pragmatism.

Intriguingly, the father of American pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce, esteemed Scotus as the greatest speculative mind of the Middle Ages, indeed, as "one of the profoundest metaphysicians that ever lived.

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